The 86th Annual Academy Awards: Best Animated Feature

16Feb

In the interest of being thorough about the Academy Awards, I have decided to dedicate a blog entry for every category. The news media will focus on the top five categories, eventually I will too, but these posts are in the interest of examining every single category, even those that send you to the fridge during the show. Today: Best Animated Feature.

If anything, 2013 reminds us of the massive slump that the American animated feature seems to have fallen into. Far from the creative tidepool that should produce the best that the medium has to offer, they have slipped into a routine of boring market-tested style of digital animated that no long has any power. Long gone is the power of The New and challenging envelope pushers that we got all those years ago with “Toy Story.” It is sort of embarrassing to look at the three American nominees, The Croods, Despicable Me 2 and Frozen alongside two foreign nominees that have been engineered with a personal touch – The French-Belgian friendship tale Ernest & Celestine and Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises.

Did I mention embarassing? How about the fact that in the 12 year history of this award, Disney has yet to win in this category. That may change with Frozen, an undeserving commercial and critical hit that might seem a foregone conclusion as far as frontrunners are concerned. Yet, it has to contend with Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises.

Who will win? Frozen
Who should win? The Wind Rises
Who should be here? Monsters University and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2